Oracle Blog

Reza Rahman's Java EE/GlassFish Blog

Friday Jul 25, 2014

As some of you may be aware, I recently joined the well-respected US based No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Tour. If you work in the US and still don't know what the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Tour is, you are doing yourself a very serious disfavor. NFJS is by far the cheapest and most effective way to stay up to date through some world class speakers and talks. Following the US cultural tradition of old-fashioned roadshows, NFJS is basically a set program of speakers and topics offered at major US cities year round.

The NFJS Lone Star Software Symposium was held July 18 - 20 in Austin, Texas. The Austin show is one of the smaller ones but still was good overall. It is one of the few events of it's kind that take place this part the country so it is extremely important. I had three talks total over two days, more or less back-to-back. I had decent attendance for all my sessions and had many of the same folks staying for multiple sessions which is always a very good sign. The close knit nature of NFJS also allows for excellent networking opportunities with users. My first talk was our flagship Java EE 7/8 talk. Currently the talk is basically about Java EE 7 but I'm slowly evolving the talk to transform it into a Java EE 8 talk as we move forward. The following is the slide deck for the talk:

Wednesday Jul 16, 2014

UberConf was held June 24 - June 27 in Denver, Colorado. For those unaware, this is essentially the largest single annual event under the NFJS umbrella and to a certain extent the culminating point of the US based tour. Unlike the usual NFJS events that are squarely locally focused, it's intent is to be a national/international conference. Consequently it has a larger set of attendees, speakers, tracks and sessions. This year's event was very vibrant and clearly a success by all measures.

Personally I was already impressed by the more local events on the tour such as the event in Columbus, Ohio and UberConf certainly did not disappoint. I had a larger number of talks and larger rooms yet still excellent attendance in my talks. As with the other shows I had many folks staying for multiple talks which is always a very good sign. I also got to do a little bit of networking with some Java EE and GlassFish users that I happen to come across. I am hoping I can get some of these folks to jump through the corporate hoops and share their adoption stories at some point.

My first talk for the conference was our flagship Java EE 7/8 talk. Currently the talk is basically about Java EE 7 but I'm slowly evolving the talk to transform it into a Java EE 8 talk as we move forward. The following is the slide deck for the talk:

Next I delivered my talk on JMS 2. Besides covering JMS 2, I've also started to roll in some of the possibilities for JMS 2.1 (as you may be aware the JMS 2.1 specification is beginning to spin up right now). The slides for the talk are posted below:

I started day two delivering my Cargo Tracker/Java EE + DDD material as a three-hour workshop. The workshop overviews DDD and describes how DDD maps to Java EE using code examples/demos from the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project. Given the depth of the topic and the current size of the application the three hour slot was actually very effective. My goal was to foster discussion and I thought folks did speak up in the workshop, certainly far more in comparison to the typical session. This bodes very well for my session at JavaOne 2014 covering the material. I and my fellow Cargo Tracker co-committer Vijay Nair will be delivering the tutorial at JavaOne. Below is the slide deck for your review:

Following my workshop, I helped out Arun Gupta with his three hour hands-on-lab on Java EE 7. This is basically the same lab that Arun developed while still at Oracle. It appears the lab has now been evolved to run on both WildFly and GlassFish. The materials for Arun's lab is available on GitHub. The lab really went very well. The attendees provided excellent feedback and the lab was standing room only even given a fairly sizable space.

Following the Java EE 7 lab I delivered my JAX-RS 2 talk. Besides JAX-RS 2, I also talked about the possibilities for JAX-RS 2.1. The slides for the talk are posted below:

My first talk for the final day of the show was my JavaScript+Java EE 7 talk. This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The slide deck for the talk is here:

The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end.

I finished off UberConf with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE". The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here:

The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running.

I did get a chance to have some fun while at UberConf. Pretty close to the conference location was the FlatIrons at Chautauqua Park. A local icon of the Boulder and Denver areas, the FlatIrons offer a very scenic hike with some of the best views of the Rocky Mountains. The hike is not supposed to be particularly strenuous, but it can be for folks like myself not acclimated to the already higher altitudes in the Denver area. Denver is at approximately 5,000 feet above sea level and rightly nicknamed the mile high city. Be very cautious while drinking or undertaking any serious physical strain while in Denver just for a few days - don't underestimate the effects of the thinner air especially if you are not in good health. Patrick Dodson, a long time GlassFish adopter accompanied me for the hike up the FlatIrons and it was definitely worth it. Check out the photos I took below:

My next NFJS show is the NFJS Lone Star Software Symposium in Austin on July 18-20. Here's my tour schedule so far, I'll keep you up-to-date as the tour goes forward: